Plasmon lasers for sensing

The resonance phenomena of surface plasmons have led to a novel class of non-contact, real-time and label-free optical sensors which have become a central tool in biochemical sensing and detection. However, all kinds of surface plasmon resonances are with natively strong non-radiative Drude damping that weakens the resonance and limits the sensing performance fundamentally. We demonstrated that these dampings can be fully compensated by gain medium at a plasmon lasing state which can lead to a new class of plasmon laser sensors.